


Overshadow

by Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays



Series: Wandering Stars [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Post-Episode: s03e02 Red Paladin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:34:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24415210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays/pseuds/Fistful_of_Gamma_Rays
Summary: A conversation about piloting happens.A conversation about living up to your predecessors doesnothappen.
Series: Wandering Stars [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1681486
Comments: 14
Kudos: 40





	Overshadow

The Red Lion’s hangar is dark and quiet except for the faint white noise of the ventilation systems and the subliminal thrum of the castle’s engines. Keith’s footsteps are painfully loud. It feels like an intrusion, like he’s trespassing. 

He guesses he kind of is, now.

He pauses directly in front of the lion and looks up. Red towers over him, enormous and inert, her head and shoulders lost in the shadows of the room. From here she looks more like a mountain than a ship, more like a monument than something alive. After a moment, he lets out a breath and tacks right, comes around to the spot at the side of her forefoot where her wrist hinges. There’s a small dark hollow behind the curve of her armor, just big enough to keep him out of the open. He lays a hand on her and waits for a second, but there’s no indication that she’s unhappy with the contact, just a faint, electric sense of awareness. With a sigh, he leans back against her and sinks down to the ground.

“Hey,” he says quietly into the dark. He’s pretty sure the lions don’t really get words. They think, but their thoughts are so vast and strange that only the edges really bleed through. It doesn’t feel right not to greet her though. 

There’s a wordless bloom of attention from the place in his mind that feels hot and strange, and he reaches back out to it. In response, he gets a familiar surge of recognition, and the faint, resonant hum that he thinks of as a welcome. It feels slightly removed now, like he’s hearing it from a distance. It might just be his imagination.

He does his best to smother a sting of resentment.

He breathes out and focuses. Red’s attention stays on him, a low growl like an engine beating through his bones, a series of vivid, blurred impressions cascading over the link. He picks through them one at a time, lingering over each. A complicated sense of heat and familiarity. The doubled sense-memory of the lion’s body hurtling through space and the controls in his hands. The satisfying slide-and-lock of a well-tuned mechanism and the adrenaline kick of a long burn. “We had a good run, huh?” he murmurs. Red’s presence shifts, and she sends him a sense of slow acceleration, engines steady.

He’s puzzling over that one when the hangar door thuds open and the lights flare on. His eyes slam shut against the painful glare and he startles, knocking his head against Red’s armor with a metallic thump. He hisses and crunches into a ball, cradling the tender spot at the back of his skull.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

There’s a series of rapid footfalls and Lance rounds the corner of Red’s foot.

“Keith? What are you doing here?” He pauses. “And why were the lights off?”

He probes at the sore spot and winces. “Didn’t need them on,” he mumbles.

Lance rolls his eyes. “Yeah, not really the important part of that question. Seriously, man, what are you doing sitting back here in the dark? You just about gave me a heart attack.”

His shoulders tighten and he hesitates a second before glancing away. “Just wanted to say goodbye, I guess.” 

“Oh.” There’s a beat of silence and Lance’s voice goes quiet. “Yeah. I get that. I said my goodbyes to Blue too.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know why you had to lurk in the dark to do that, but you do you, I guess.”

He hauls himself upright, ready to leave, but hangs back. Lance is shifting awkwardly on his feet, his jaw working like he wants to say something. After a moment, he spits it out. “Hey, it’s weird, right? Having a new lion? It’s not just me?”

Keith freezes, and Lance gives a little, uncomfortable laugh and continues on. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy Blue picked Allura - she’s gonna do great with her. If I had to leave her, I’m glad that’s how it happened. But I _know_ Blue. And I don’t know Red at all, and she is a _lot_. It’s got to be kind of the same for you, right?”

There’s a considering, weighty shift in the back of his head, the Black Lion’s attention breathing down the back of his thoughts like the smell of ozone before a storm. He flinches away from it. “Yeah,” he says after a moment.

The silence after that goes on a little too long. Lance gnaws at his lip. “You got any tips? For Red?”

Keith stares. “You’re asking me for advice?”

“Who else am I gonna ask?” His expression tightens and his gaze skitters to the side. “I don’t know if you noticed, but today wasn’t my finest performance. If you’ve got any pointers, I’ll take them.”

He eyes him warily, but there’s no dig to follow that up. Just Lance, arms akimbo, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “You’re hitting the throttle too hard and relying too much on the aft thrusters to change your vector,” he says finally. “When you try and change your heading like that it’s…” He grimaces, and sketches a quick, jerky path in the air with his hand. “Unstable. Hard to control.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Lance mutters.

“Do you want my advice or not?”

He shakes his head. “Yeah, I asked. All right, so how do _you_ change your heading?”

He has to pause and order his thoughts for a few seconds, working his fingers while he tries to figure out how to explain it. “The lions aren’t like regular ships, right? Their bodies move. You have to use that,” he says slowly. He considers. “Don’t think it matters as much with the other lions. Red doesn’t have a lot of mass compared to them, but she has more thrust. So when you hit one of the engines hard to make a turn it can kind of kick you into a spin.” He gestures again. “You’re usually better off trying to pick up some angular acceleration with her tail or her head. Easier to work with.” 

Lance is watching him with an expression he can’t quite decipher. “And you just… got in the lion and figured that out.”

He shrugs. “It’s not magic. You get a feel for it after a while.”

Lance eyes him steadily for a second before looking away. “Yeah. Flying by instinct, huh?” It comes out flat and a little curt, like he’s bitten the end off it.

He frowns and mentally backtracks, trying to figure out if he’s said something wrong. He doesn’t think so, but something about that response is off. He watches Lance’s silhouette against Red’s armor, straight-backed and stiff-shouldered, and belatedly, it occurs to him that Lance used to spend a lot of time griping about not making the fighter class cutoff. That he might actually take the whole _flying by instinct_ thing seriously. 

It’s not something Keith has ever taken particularly seriously. He’s a good pilot and knows it, but there’s nothing preternatural about it. Just quick reflexes and a hunger to push himself higher, faster, further. He’s not sure what to do with the idea that Lance _does_ take it seriously.

Shiro, he thinks helplessly, would know what to do with this. He would have some kind of pithy reassurance to offer, some practical advice. The right words to start fixing it. Keith’s got nothing. _A leader people will follow without question._ Yeah. Right.

The Black Lion’s attention focuses, and for just an instant, her presence feels so much like Shiro that he has to squeeze his eyes shut. He takes a breath. “Look. I screwed up out there today too. You saw that.”

“Yeah.” After a second, Lance’s posture loosens, and his voice slides into a familiar, irritating tone. “I definitely saw that.”

Keith ignores it. “The lions don’t fly the same. We’re both going to have to relearn.”

Lance watches him for a long moment and then exhales. “Guess we are.” He runs a hand through his hair and leans back against Red’s foot. “Thanks. For the advice.”

Something echoes back through Keith’s link with Red. Approval, maybe. Satisfaction. It feels like he should say something more, but he can’t think of anything. After an uncomfortable few seconds trying to dig up better words, he gives up. “I’ll get out of your way.” He starts for the door.

“Hey, wait.” Lance gestures vaguely at the room. “I kind of interrupted earlier. If you want to spend some more time, uh, communing I can leave you alone for a bit.” He tips his head towards Red. “If you want to take her out for a flight, I don’t think she’d mind another turn with a pilot who knows what they’re doing.”

Keith hesitates for a long moment. He wants badly to fly Red again. He knows exactly how to work with her, how to move them through space the way they want. No lag of unfamiliar controls, no fumbling to compensate for unaccustomed inertia. He can just open up the throttle and go, not think about anything but momentum and acceleration for a while, push the thrusters hard enough to chase Shiro’s absence out of his head.

But there’s something a little sour lurking under _a pilot who knows what they’re doing_.

He shoves his fists into his pockets and shakes his head. The jacket pulls tight over his shoulders and the back of his neck. “I was about done.”

“You sure, man?”

“Yeah.”

“If you say so.” There’s something uncomfortably perceptive in the slight frown Lance turns on him. “Offer’s open, though.”

“Thanks.” He glances away. “Maybe later.”

Maybe it’s the right thing to say. Lance’s expression eases, and he slumps back against Red’s foot. “Sure.”

He nods and turns for the hangar door again. His steps slow when there’s a pulse through the link, and Red sends him that feeling of slow acceleration again. This time, there’s a sense of _things-to-come_ about it, maybe as close as the lions get to a future tense. It could be a goodbye or a promise.

Either way, he latches on and holds it close until his steps carry him out the hangar door.


End file.
